Mastering Garbage Collection in Rust without a single unsafe block Let’s be real: most Rust GC libraries have a dirty secret buried in their Cargo.toml . They claim to be "memory safe" but immediately reach for unsafe blocks the moment a cyclic graph appears. They’ll tell you that managing back-references and complex object ownership is "impossible" within the borrow checker’s constraints. But that’s just a lack of imagination. You don't need raw pointers to build a high-performance collector; you need a better architecture. By swapping raw pointer manipulation for arena-based indices, we move the safety burden from your tired brain to the Rust compiler, where it belongs. The core shift is simple: use a Vec -backed arena. Instead of juggling *mut T and praying you don't hit a use-after-free, you operate with u32 indices. This isn't just a workaround—it’s a robust design pattern that turns pointer arithmetic into bounds-checked lookups.…